Monday, July 28, 2014

Greff Fabrics Blues, 1971 (xxv)

If I remember correctly, in 1971 Snelling and Snelling still required the aplicants it placed in permanent jobs at firms like Greff Fabrics to continue working at the job for at least 3 months, in order to avoid being charged some kind of fee for having quit the job before 3 months were up.So although I was ready to quit once Mr. Hamilton unfairly gave Rob, the African-American supervisor, the axe, I waited until my 3 months at Greff Fabrics were up at the end of December 1971 to give my notice that I was quitting. But by New Year's Eve, I was on a passenger train heading for some campus town in the Midwest with the money I had saved from my Greff Fabrics job in my wallet; and with my only luggage being a duffel bag and a cheap guitar.I then spent most of the train ride conversing with another long-haired hippie who was heading for the University of Kansas's campus in Lawrence, Kansas.By the end of 1971, the New Left aboveground political scene and Movement scene in New York City seemed completely dead again; and the campuses around New York City's five boroughs seemed to once again resemble the silent campuses of the 1950s McCarthy era from a political point of view. Neither at Greff Fabrics nor at the other 9-to-5 "real world" workplace scenes was there any evidence that any significant group of 1960s New Left revolutionary activists were going to be able to radicalize the 9-to-5 New York City workers politically during the 1970s, so that they would come to reject U.S. capitalism and 9-to-5 slavery enmasse, and also support a Black Panther Party-led or revolutionary feminist women-led anti-imperialist revolution in the United States.Yet by the Spring of 1972, some buildings at Columbia University would again be re-occupied by anti-war students after the Nixon administration resumed the Pentagon's bombing of North Vietnam; and it was becoming evident that the FBI was unable to capture most of the anti-war New Left Movement people who had gone underground and become 1970s weatherfugitives.But, in retrospect, my post-Greff Fabrics work experience-based late 1971 impression fear that the New Left would continue to make no significant political impact on the continued "business-as-usual" functioning of the 9-to-5 Death Culture world of capitalist wage slavery during the rest of the 20th-century and early 21st-century ended up being a fairly realistic fear. Without the kind of daily U.S. mass media tv news show access that Abbie Hoffman and the seven other Chicago Conspiracy 8 Trial defendants had been given in late 1969 and early 1970 (or that Columbia SDS people had enjoyed in late April and May of 1968), New Left revolutionaries--whether male, female, African-American or white--would be unable to develop a mass base of working-class support for a Revolution in the United States during the rest of the 20th-century.And the plastic Greff Fabrics pattern of manager-employee power and economic relations of 1971 would continue to be replicated year-after-year in most other plastic, authoritarian U.S. Death Culture workplaces--regardless of how much the technology that was utilized at these for-profit or tax-exempt non-profit workplaces would be changed or modernized.Plutocratis, oligarchs, capitalists, bankers and their ass-licking managers--not the New Left revolutionaries and anti-capitalist U.S. workers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds--would continue to rule the 9-to-5 "real world" work scene; and institutional classism and economic inequality in the United States would begin to intensify during the next 45 years.(the end)